Big Total

A State Department spokesman testified before congress that Mexico's gangs earn $25 billion per year from the traffic of illicit drugs. There's a wide range of estimates (check page 7 of the linked file) of what that total is, and $25 billion seems to me to be slightly higher than the most common guesses. Furthermore, take into account all the anecdotal evidence suggests that Mexican drug gangs have been forced by the disruption of trafficking routes to supplement their drug income with other criminal activities (people smuggling, extortion, et cetera), and $25 billion seems even more likely to be off the mark.

The spokesman also said that Mexican drug consumption has doubled since 2002. He's not the only official to make this claim, but fortunately for Mexico, it's contradicted by the most reliable piece of evidence, the National Survey on Addiction. Here, I cede the floor to myself, refuting the Genaro García Luna, who was claiming a six-year doubling a couple of weeks ago:

According to the most recent National Survey on Addiction (scroll down to the bottom right section of the paper for the relevant info), which measured the increase in the previous six years, shows that the number of users (as distinct from addicts) went from 4.6 percent to 5.5 percent of the population, which is an increase slightly less than 20 percent, and significantly less than the doubling that García Luna suggested. Of course, he was talking about total consumption, so I suppose it's possible that the 0.9 percent of Mexicans who started using accounted for a 100 percent increase in consumption, but that's highly unlikely.